Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
1 November
BRITAIN'S BRUTAL TACTICS AGAINST PALESTINIAN REVOLT
On this day in 1938, Bernard Montgomery assumed a command in Palestine to join the British crushing of the Palestinian revolt. After the rebel defeat Montgomery said, "I shall be sorry to leave Palestine...I have enjoyed the war out here". The British used methods and other personnel from Ireland where Montgomery had served in what he called “a murder campaign in which...[British] soldiers became very skilful and more than held their own. My own view is that to win a war of that sort you must be ruthless.”
التكتيكات البريطانية الوحشية ضد الثورة الفلسطينية
1 نوفمبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1938 ، تولى برنارد مونتغمري القيادة في فلسطين للانضمام إلى البريطانيين لسحق الثورة الفلسطينية. بعد هزيمة المتمردين ، قال مونتغمري: "سأشعربالاسف لمغادرة فلسطين ... لقد استمتعت ممارسة الحرب هنا ".استخدم البريطانيون أساليب وأفراد آخرين من أيرلندا ، حيث خدم مونتغمري، في ما أسماه "حملة قتل أصبح فيها ... الجنود [البريطانيون] ماهرين جدًا وكانوا أكثر مهارة فيها من طرقهم الخاصة. وجهة نظري الشخصية هي أنه للفوز في حرب من هذا النوع يجب أن تكون قاسيا
British Mandate in Palestine laid foundation for tactics used in Israel’s military occupation of Palestinians today.
While the British Mandate in Palestine lasted for 31 years, notorious remnants of its legacy are still felt by the Palestinians on a daily basis at the hands of the Israeli army...
“Anyone who looks at the methods the British used in Palestine during the 1930s will see strong parallels with what Israel is doing today,” said David Cronin, journalist and author of Balfour’s Shadow.
One such tactic was punitive house demolitions, carried out as a measure of deterrence. Another was administrative detention, or the internment of prisoners for an indefinite period of time without subjecting them to trial or charges.
A direct legacy of British rule in Palestine that the Israeli army has replicated is the British emergency laws applied in 1945 – which Bregman said is still in use by the Israelis to “justify their actions in the occupied territories”.
“In 1967 when the Israelis occupied the remaining Palestinian territories, they resorted to many of the old British emergency laws that gave the military occupation the right to impose collective punishment such as demolishing houses,” according to Ahmad Khalidi, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies
At the height of the second Intifada in 2002, the Israeli army demolished 252 homes in the occupied territories, rendering just over 1,400 Palestinians homeless. Between the years of 1936 and 1939, the British authorities had demolished 5,000 Palestinian homes.
Cronin said that the British had helped the groundwork for the Nakba. It was after all the Haganah who were responsible for mapping out Plan Dalet, the blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. “Many of the Zionist forces who forced around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine had received British training”.
On June 16, 1936, approximately 240 homes were blown up by the British in the Old City of Jaffa, leaving as many as 6,000 Palestinians homeless. They were informed by air-dropped leaflets the same morning and many became destitute, having lost all their possessions with their homes.
Matthew Hughes wrote how the British army had cut wide pathways through the old city with explosives to “allow military access to, and control of, a rebel-held area that had previously eluded military control”.
This has been copied verbatim by the Israeli army, most notably during their invasions of the Jenin refugee camp and Nablus’s old city in the second Intifada, where their tanks flattened narrow alleyways, houses and other structures in their way.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in November 1946 that Montgomery was heading to Palestine to deal with any pro-Palestinian sympathies among British soldiers:
"Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial Staff, will visit Palestine next week-end in an attempt to combat “the hideous growth of anti-Semitism” among the troops there, it was reported today in the Manchester Guardian. The paper predicts that his visit will lead to “important results.”
Mongomery's attitude to 'inferior races' such the Palestinians, Irish and Africans underpinned his ability to "enjoy" a British Army "murder campaign" and shoot large numbers of Palestinians. Late in 1947, he went on a month's tour of Africa and concluded that it could be used as a massive source of raw materials for a new post-war Britain - a counterbalance to the fading Empire in the East. He criticized the Colonial Office for lacking a "grand design." In 1998, the Public Record Office released Montgomery's secret 1948 report where he had dismissed the African as "a complete savage" incapable of developing the continent
Baxter, Colin (1999). Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1887–1976, p.125
There is a statue of Mongomery outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, London
7-minute video: what British people are told about M ontgomery
See also 14 September
"British soldiers brutalised Jewish troops by training them in well-established British counterinsurgency methods that targeted civilians and villages close to..."